The important question is: How often do you actually drive far enough in one day to drain the battery and need to recharge away from home.

I know in my own life & commute, the answer is "not at all" - being able to gas up on a long trip just isn't a use case. On the other hand, with an Electric, never having to stop at a gas station is a big advantage/selling point.

Batteries are becoming cheaper very quickly with cost parity expected in less than a decade. The ability to charge faster is also improving dramatically, so those disadvantages of electric cars are rapidly vanishing. It's already a lower cost per mile to drive electric, and maintenance costs are lower on electric cars compared to cars powered by ICE's.

I suspect for an increasing number of people (especially those living in cities or suburbia), the advantages of electric cars will soon be more than sufficiently compelling to warrant a switch to electric.

"Green" has little to do with it. Convenience and cost per mile are big advantages of electric vehicles.

You're aware there were hordes of Apple II clones, right? I started my computing life on a Franklin ACE 1000 - a superior clone of the Apple II. After it died, I got another Apple II clone (A "Laser 128" as I recall). There were Apple clones for over ten years with the Apple II, and several more years with the Macintosh.

Apple II clones died for two reasons: The Apple II was a very old architecture, only capable of 64k of memory. Also, most of the cloners illegally copied Apple's BIOS. Even then, Apple vs. Franklin was in 1987 - ten years after the Apple II was released.

IBM did sue clone makers into oblivion. In fact, after Apple vs. Franklin, IBM sued a number of early cloners out of existence for the because they also illegally copied from IBM's BIOS.

The difference is that nobody saw the point in writing a clean-room Apple II ROM in 1987. The world had moved beyond 64k, and there was no point in denying reality. Even Apple was pounding nails in the Apple II's coffin.

In contrast, Phoenix and AMI both had clean-room IBM BIOS clones written in 1984 and '85 - years before Apple vs. Franklin. IBM couldn't touch Phoenix or AMI.

So IBM tried to destroy cloners by creating the backwards (but not forwards) compatible PS/2, complete with their backwards (but not forwards) compatible OS/2.

In the end, it came down to price: A clone was more capable than IBM's PS/2 disaster, and had a cost far less than the PS/2 or a Macintosh.

IBM tried its best to kill the PC clone. The difference is that unlike the Apple II, the PC clone could handily beat the PS/2 that was supposed to replace it.

Never forget: The PC clone didn't just beat the Apple Mac - it beat IBM's replacement for the PC as well.

And it did so for the same reason Timex has far more market share than Rolex or Tag Heuer: It does the same job for a lot less money.

The thing is average Americans don't use BTU's either. MegaJoules are every bit as abstract and unfamiliar.

The only things I see in "everyday" use for the BTU: Cooking stoves and window air conditioners -- things you don't buy or compare often. . In both cases, it's not "meaningful" other than a higher number is more powerful.

One big problem is that the "nutritional" industry, which amount to well-spoken charlatans. They make outlandish, unprovable claims, and people swallow it (literally) by the billions.

They masquerade marketing as science in order feign legitimacy, and the fact is they aren't providing anything with a provable benefit.

The only regulatory bar they have to cross is that it's not obviously harmful. There's no requirement that the 'supplement' be beneficial.

It's bad enough to claim that some herb or vitamin supplement provides health benefits that are nonexistent. It's another thing entirely to sell a product that doesn't even have what is on the label. This morning, ABC news had a story about a number of nutritional companies were forced to pull their 'supplements' after testing proved they didn't contain anything they claimed to have.

I wish I could say I'm surprised, but after working for such a company, I have few doubts: the entire industry is rotten to the core, and is only interested in fooling their customers into buying snake oil. It's not like it's an insular thing; you're have to be aware of what the competition is doing, and I saw the same BS everywhere.

Japan can also print its own money, which gives it the ability (at least in theory) to wipe out all public debt with the stroke of a pen. There are consequences to that action, but when your debt is counted in your own currency, you can largely ignore the public debt, as long as inflation is kept in check. Most non-eurozone countries (including the US) do the same thing. In fact, inflation has long been used by most nations to decrease the impact of public debt, as the fixed-dollar debt can be reduced to a smaller %age of the GDP. It's how Great Britian and the US 'paid' for World War II, for example. As another example, recall the talk about a "trillion dollar platinum coin" during the most recent US government shutdown, which would have paid off a trillion dollars of debt as well as instantly and drastically inflated the dollar (among other things).

Greece doesn't have a national currency. Their debt is in Euros, and must be repaid in Euros. Greece can't unilaterally inflate the Euro to reduce their debt load. The situation is closer to the economy of California, which is also heavily in debt. California doesn't get to print its own money, and it doesn't have the option of creating inflation to reduce its debt load.

Greece and California have two choices: Make their payments, and hope inflation happens on its own, or default and accept they won't be able to borrow money for a substantial amount of time. Growing their economies makes both options more palatable, but doesn't solve the problem by itself.